Executions 'never go as smoothly as they would like to think', death row lawyer tells LBC
Clive Stafford Smith said executions “never go as smoothly and professionally as they would like to think”, after death row prisoner Christa Pike reportedly survived two lethal injection attempts in Tennessee last night.
A human rights lawyer who has represented more than 400 prisoners on death row has told LBC News that failed executions “happen quite a lot”.
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Clive Stafford Smith said executions “never go as smoothly and professionally as they would like to think”, after death row prisoner Christa Pike reportedly survived two lethal injection attempts in Tennessee last night.
Pike was reportedly rushed to hospital after the execution attempt was halted. The state has paused executions until next year.
Mr Stafford Smith, who said six of his clients had been executed, told Charlotte Lynch on LBC News: “It’s not very unusual.”
“There are reasons for that,” he said. “One is that it’s very hard for them to get the drugs they want that are good drugs, because no drug company actually wants their life-saving drugs used to kill people.”
Read more: Who is Christa Pike? Tennessee death row killer in hospital
Another reason, he said, is that executioners are not doctors because it would directly contradict the Hippocratic oath – the oath that doctors take to preserve human life. As such, they can struggle to find a vein.
In the aftermath of the botched attempt, Mr Stafford Smith said Pike may suffer brain damage, depending on how long the drugs had taken effect for.
He said: “It’s hard to say. I mean, Dr Jill Zivitz, who’s been a very, very fine expert for us on many of these cases, has already told me that she may suffer from brain damage depending on how long she was under with these drugs.”
Pike was then taken to hospital, he said, “to try to help her recover, only because they want to kill her again”, which he described as “madness”.
Mr Stafford Smith pointed out that Pike is a woman and said that 99% of people executed in the US since 1977 have been men. He also highlighted Pike’s reported history of childhood sexual abuse.
“Tennessee has been trying to institute the death penalty for people who rape children,” he said. “Now, Christa, when she was a child, was indeed raped herself an awful lot of times.”
He said this marked an “intense irony” which illustrated what he described as “the deranged nature of the whole process”.
Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike was taken to hospital after her heart was still beating following two lethal injections during a failed execution attempt.
Pike, 50, was set to be the first woman to be executed in the US state for more than 200 years for stabbing and beating a classmate three decades ago in 1995.
But her lawyers say after two syringes of pentobarbital were administered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, she still has a heartbeat and was even snoring
She is now recovering in hospital, authorities added. Experts have described the incident as "unparalleled".
Pike's legal team said : "Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution."We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy."
In a statement, the Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed "every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,
"The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening. Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility," the statement concluded.
There had been a last-minute legal challenge to try to stop the execution but in the end the Supreme Court ruled it should go ahead.
Pike, 50, whose clemency petition highlighting childhood trauma and sexual abuse was denied by Governor Bill Lee on Monday.
She would be the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment to be executed in Tennessee for a crime committed as a teenager.
Pike was 18 in 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend and a third companion lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her.
The gruesome nature of the murder, which involved the perpetrators carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim's chest and taking a chunk of her skull as a souvenir, drew intense media coverage at the time.
Trial testimony indicated that Pike viewed Slemmer as a rival for the affections of her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.
Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted the following year of first-degree murder.
Because Shipp was 17 at the time of Ms Slemmer's murder, jurors could not consider the death penalty, and he received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Their co-defendant, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 at the time of the murder and had acted as a lookout for the other two, appeared as a witness for the prosecution and received probation.
Currently the only woman on the southern state's death row, Pike was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder in an assault on another inmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.
In a 226-page petition asking the governor to commute her death sentence to a life sentence without the possibility of parole, her lawyers documented her history as a childhood victim of violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including two rapes at ages 11 and 17.
They also cited the diagnoses she received in prison for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Her lawyers also pointed to evidence that Pike's mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to faulty brain development that made it difficult for their client to control her impulses as a young person.
"The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists," her lawyers wrote in response to Lee's denial of clemency.
"Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women."
Ms Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, has spoken out in support of the execution.
Executions of female prison inmates are exceedingly rare in the US, with women accounting for just 18 of the 1,683 people put to death since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Before Wednesday, Tennessee had executed 17 people.Pike's case has drawn international attention, with a group of United Nations human rights experts issuing a recent statement calling for commutation of her death sentence.